DPP Webinar: Clean Data and Supplier Talks Come First

The Digital Product Passport is a data and supplier project before it is a legal date. Start on the record and on the conversations with suppliers, or the deadline arrives with fields nobody can fill. That is the practical line from this webinar with Lucy Blackley, co-founder of Bombiix, and Stephan Spijkers.

They treat the passport as a structured view of the product over its life, which forces a cleaner record and a process that crosses departments. Waiting for the final legal text feels prudent and leaves you importing supplier data in a panic. The Digital Product Passport guide is the buyer map of what the record has to hold. This session is about the work that has to start while that map is still moving.

Speakers

• Lucy Blackley, Co-founder, Bombiix
• Stephan Spijkers, Co-founder, PIMvendors.com

What they want started now

The passport's value, in their account, is transparency across the product life, not a form you file once. Organisations have to prepare well before the dates, because the data is scattered and a lot of it sits with suppliers. Clean data is the requirement they put first. A passport published from a dirty record is a compliant-looking page that a customer, or a regulator, can pull apart.

Collaboration across departments is the operating problem. Product, sustainability, procurement and the channel teams each hold a piece, and none of them can finish the passport alone. A written process (who supplies which value, who approves it, how it is updated) does more for compliance than another tool selection. Product data quality and governance is that process in the general case: an owner, a definition of complete, and a way to keep it.

Suppliers and other parties in the chain raise the accuracy, because they hold the values you do not. Blackley and Spijkers also point at industry communities as a place to compare notes, so you are not inventing the attribute list in isolation. The first step they name is simply to start the internal conversation. Digital change of this kind is gradual. A late programme that tries to do it in one quarter will meet the same supplier delays, with less time.

They frame the passport as a chance to improve how you manage the product over its life, not only as a regulation to survive. The trade-off of that framing is scope. A life-cycle project is larger than a compliance checklist, and it needs an owner who can say no to fields that no channel will use.

What to do with this

List the passport attributes you already store, the ones only a supplier knows, and the department that would approve each value. That list is the project. The trade-off of starting now is that some fields will change when the legal text settles, and you will redo a slice of the model. The trade-off of waiting is that the supplier work, which is the slow part, has not started when the date is real.

The PIM implementation guide is where this sits if the passport is one of the reasons you are choosing a system: supplier intake and approval belong in the rollout, not in a follow-up project after go-live.